Monday, April 18, 2011

Its been a while. To all my readers I have (my friends and the random person that passes by every now and then hahah) you probably know the reason why I haven’t contributed to my blog in a while. I took too many classes in a semester of school that proved to be particularly challenging. I worked and set up an exhibition at the same time as well; I’m actually at the gallery right now writing this. It has been a hectic 2 months… and I’m amazed I’m not done yet. My school work is going all right, I don’t have a reason to fret per se, except for the lack of time. I handed it, or am going to hand in, quite a few papers late; I promised myself I wouldn’t but under the time constraint I had it’s proven to be impossible. That in turn made studying for tests difficult too. Once again, I’m not sure if I can boast about having a good mark in exams this semester, because I honestly don’t know how accurate my answers really were, and if the teacher will cut me some slack and provide me with partial marks for the answers I knew I couldn’t answer completely (like picture for woman (1969) by Jeff Wall for example and how it relates to ---- by Manet…)

The gallery for me has been a mixed bag of feelings. To be honest I was iffy from the start. I had a negative attitude about the whole affair, and I found many faults and no answers. It’s a big step to go in a gallery; what if no one comes? What if everything blows up in our faces? Ridiculous fears to be sure, but they were there… until we got a grant of course. The fact the university found in us a project worthy enough to warrant a grant, no matter how small, filled us with hope. From that point on it became a question of not if, but when and how often. We worked incredibly hard on it. I found my lack of experience in the gallery world troublesome, and my schoolwork made me stay in the west island, far from the downtown core, so I completed advertising and anything I could do from home to help. Jean Marc and Eunice really showed their colours here, and I learned so much, even from my far away position.

Then during this week we finally opened it up. There were so many people, and everyone had a great time, myself included. It was essentially a celebration to the end of school, before school ended. I felt good mingling with people, thinking to myself all the while ‘We did this! People are here because of us.’ The only real disadvantage came from learning that while many people enjoyed the works on the wall, no one seemed inclined to buy anything. The advertising we made seemed insufficient. At this point we haven’t sold works yet, and this has been a blow. I started thinking about my future again. Apparently art history is a hard field to go into! I started wondering what future I’ll have without a master’ degree… if I’ll be able to get anything in terms of work, and if I’ll have to go back to school to get another degree… it’s a terrible prospect… I feel like I’d have wasted years of my life learning nothing practical.

I did get to talk to Emily though, and as always she made me feel better. It is not the end of the world. This was in the end a wonderful experience, and I have to admit I enjoy coming down to the gallery every morning. It’s a good feeling knowing you own something as amazing as a gallery… this is a dream. Art history as a field is amazing in the sense that the program has such vast possibilities. I can end up in the arts or I could go work for magazines or websites etc. The knowledge I’m gaining is opening my eyes in terms of art… and in the end I chose this program because I truly enjoy it. Emily will be a cook, and chances are she’ll have much stabler employment then I will. That might just be a big advantage for us in the future, and it made me feel better. I just need to stay positive about everything. That’s the bottom line. I’m accomplishing a lot. By getting a degree and getting work and volunteering we all are, and that can’t be a bad thing. I will tell myself that if I believe in myself, others will believe in me, which in turn will make me believe in myself. I can’t feel negative, because that just breeds negativity. The semester is almost done guys, then we can just stay at home in our undies and play video games, watch tv or exercise (hein Eunice and Jean Marc?? Nudge Nudge) I for one plan on playing that complicated world war 2 game several times, with different countries. Be the bad guys and see how fast Germany can conquer the world, and for a challenge, manage to be Japan and hope for the best against the U.S. and play Italy to try and recreate the Roman Empire.

We’ll see guys, this is just a step in our lives. It’s simply the beginning of a new chapter, and at least we know that we have each other to help out and work with. We are a group of incredibly resourceful, varied and smart people. Some have great talent in their work, some are incredibly intelligent and quite frankly you people all are kind hearted. We’ll all go far in life, there is no reason we won’t be. So get this shit done, and let’s enjoy summer! I for one plan to walk up mount royal again through the back way and get mauled by mosquitos! The view was worth it.